Education or Indoctrination

Pop Quiz:

What Greek philosopher said: “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”?

What American writer observed: “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”?

What economist noted: “Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.”?

What soldier of Conservative enlightenment said: ” While freedom-loving people like libertarians and conservatives wish to provide the illumination of facts and the focus of reason for young people so that they might see and think clearly, those who call themselves progressives favor the classic totalitarian tactic of indoctrination.”?

Answers at the end of this post

Is an ignorant voting public an existential threat to democracy? (Rhetorical question alert)

We are surrounded by irrefutable evidence that the American education system, once the envy of the world, has become a tool of those who describe themselves as “progressive”. Recently an amateur video interview was made public that raised a very troubling question: Are we at a point we have created young people who can best be described as “zombie” voters? This young woman was lamenting the fact that Trump had survived the recent assassination attempt. The person recording her comments gave her every opportunity to explain why she thought that killing Trump was a viable political option. She made a Chatty Cathy Doll look incisive and thoughtful. There was no evidence of critical thinking, no hint of a rational basis for her desire to have Trump murdered and her comments were limited to a repetition of what the great minds at CNN fob off as political analysis. In short, she is an uninformed product of our government schools, the leftist news media and social media..

The extracostitutional Covid lock down provided to the public a sobering insight as to what was being taught and, more importantly, not being taught in the public schools. The damage done to school age children may be irreversible and there are those in our education infrastructure who believe that we did not shut the system down long enough. When plans were being made to reopen the schools teacher unions across the country pushed back and used the crisis to make demands that had nothing to do with educating the students, education arguably being their primary mission. National Educators United demanded that the schools should not be reopened without: Police free schools, support for our communities including canceling rents and mortgages, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, a moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing and a “massive” infusion of federal money for reopening. Strangely absent is any demand related to the education of their students.

It would appear that there was a mental instability symptom of Covid.

The vacuum that was created by the empty classrooms caused a geometric increase of reliance on social media by school aged children from which they “learned” what was allegedly going on in the world. The biggest “winner” was Tik Tok which is a product of the Communist Chinese government. There are several excellent books that document this unfortunate situation. Blood Money by Peter Schweitzer establishes the connection between the CCP and the growth of Tik Tok worldwide. Stanley Ridgley’s Brutal Minds documents the brainwashing that drives the social media establishment. The parental backlash that the educational establishment is trying desperately to tamp down is well documented in a recent publication: The Parent Revolution by Corey DeAngelis.

The influence of Tik Tok, Facebook and Google is insidious. Tragically the failure of the schools makes young people more susceptible to indoctrination techniques that are knowingly embedded in these social media platforms. The fact that our schools do not teach the art of critical thinking in the classroom makes the social media followers easy targets for propagandists. All elements of the intellectual maturation and the development of the self esteem of our children are adversely impacted by this indoctrination.

I have spoken with a number of high school students to better understand the impact of social media on their peers. It was agreed that the behavior of students has been adversely impacted to some degree by the information, including mis and disinformation, which is pervasive on these social media platforms.

Communication: Young people seem less comfortable with face to face communication. Any disagreement on a subject seems to make younger people “uncomfortable”. The introduction of information that is new or does not conform to the prevailing social media narrative is reflexively treated as “disinformation” and students have not been encouraged to research issues to better deal with new information. Recently I spoke at a local high school and I wrote on the whiteboard a simple comment: There is no climate crisis. One student literally melted down but made no attempt to understand the basis for my comment.

It has become obvious that the so-called “lies” by Trump are nothing more than statements that the listener has never heard before or disagrees with. Civil debate is a dead letter in our schools. The response from the Left is not to provide facts or arguments but to censor those who have the temerity to engage in free thinking. If you questioned the efficacy of masks during the Covid “crisis” your Facebook account was immediately closed down. If you suggest that the anthropogenic climate change is a hoax you risk ex-communication from the public square. If you defend the right of Israel to exist you are described as a supporter of genocide. Our schools have disarmed any opposition to the prevailing social narrative and effectively stifled intellectual curiosity. On a positive note Twitter has become X and under the enlightened management of Elon Musk it has become a market place for lively social and political debate.

Self-Esteem: The social media oligarchs have generated a system that seems designed to undermine the self-esteem of young people who are struggling through physical and intellectual maturation. Eating disorders are increasing, sexual dysphoria is being promoted and a collective depression is being fostered by a relentless barrage of negative narratives. The daughter of a friend is an excellent soccer player and was working hard to get a D1 scholarship. Things changed when she became a devotee of Tik Tok. The soccer dream is dead, she was voluntarily committed after an attempted suicide and she has confessed to suffering from bulimia. A very troubling book, Irreversible Damage, by Abigail Shrier, explores the epidemic of transgenderism among young women in America. All you need to know about the book is that there was a coordinated effort to keep the book from being published and when it was finally published by Regnery Publishing there was a nationwide campaign to keep it off the bookstore shelves. Apparently it made people uncomfortable.

The teaching of Critical Race Theory undermines the self-esteem of white students who are forced to confess their privilege based on a history of “white supremacy”. The 1619 Project is based on the fiction that our nation was founded by slave owners and that everything that followed the settling of Virginia was designed to protect the white “overlords”. Such exercises in “instruction” are intended to destroy white self-esteem. Rather it merely teaches Black students that they have always been second class citizens and that the deck will be forever stacked against them absent some level of “revolution”. Ironically it is the very divisive behavior that the Democrats attribute to Trump and the MAGA deplorables.

Are the schools working to reverse the tectonic shift that was ushered in by the Brown v. Board of Education decision? Is that even being taught anymore?

Fear: There are young women in our country who have decided to have hysterectomies rather than bring children into a world that is, in their fevered minds, doomed to become a burnt out cinder because of climate change. It is hard to think of a more irrational response to a hoax being driven by the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF). We lived down to the pejorative “the sheeple” during the Covid authoritarianism and yet we managed to survive a virus that had a survival rate in excess of 99%. You still see people wearing masks in cars and public places. Somewhere Ivan Pavlov is smiling. There is a direct correlation between people wearing masks alone in a car and the Biden bumper sticker on that vehicle.

The schools, the news media and the social media actively support social and governmental fearmongering. Any young person who fails to fall in line is relegated to a social gulag and they become pariahs in their world. That students at American colleges and universities engage in demonstrations supporting the genocidal troglodytes of Hamas and chanting “gas the Jews” should be a wake up call for everyone who believes in a civil society. It is proof positive that indoctrination is afoot.

Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The woman referenced in the first paragraph of this post is irrefutable evidence that we no longer have an informed electorate…zombie voters.

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”

Additional recommended reading: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom; Mediocrity by Connor Boyack; Illiberal Education by Dinesh D’Souza; The Schools We Need by E.D. Hirsch and Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes.

Answers to the Pop Quiz:

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” Diogenes who reportedly will bypass the Democrat convention in his search for an honest person

“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.” Alvin Toffler

“Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.” The world renowned Uncle Tom, Thomas Sowell

“While freedom-loving people like libertarians and conservatives wish to provide the illumination of facts and the focus of reason for young people so that they might see and think clearly, those who call themselves progressives favor the classic totalitarian tactic of indoctrination.” Charlie Kirk, Founder of Turning Point USA. who prowls college campuses in search of random acts of education